The Holy Grail of Content is…

While content marketing the word has just become popular in the last few years, its roots and practice go back for ages. It is as simple as inception. You plant an idea and then let the person start noticing why that idea has merit. You don’t have to convince the person to buy. The life cycle naturally takes the customer through that process.

You do however have to stay in front and establish your brand as the best choice to solve the problem.

Content marketing is all about the audience. That is why understanding the audience is so important. You have to ensure that your audience grasps the depths of your product. Do they understand what the major and minor problems it solves really are? Do they understand the pain they could fix for $$?

That is why marketers have told me that they fall short. They don’t realize it when they are talking to me. They just give me their complaints. I just have listened enough to identify what that particular brand is missing.

The number one “Holy Grail” of Content Marketing is Audience Engagement.

What is Audience Engagement?

Audience engagement is not a noun. It is a verb. It is the point where your audience takes massive action on your website. They join funnels (subscriptions). They share your post. They email the concepts to friends. You are presented in meetings as the answer. They trust you. They trust your content. They know without a doubt that you have the answer to their problems.

How Do You Get Audience Engagement?

The answer is one of the most sought after problems in internet marketing today. An engaged audience of 1,000 visitors will spend more and power your website more than a group of 1,000,000 visitors.

That is the real power in content marketing. It is also, sadly, why so many are failing to achieve their goals.

Audience engagement comes from a few critical pieces of information. Information and emotion. It is not something that you can gain because you logically have a better answer.

You are not going to outsmart customers. They can sense it.

LOOK. I love the science and systems of marketing. Those are great. The real power comes from the emotional entanglement you get in with customers.

The Truth Of Audience Engagement is Found Here…

You have to understand their desires and problems. You have to do market research. You have to get why they want something. You have to understand and feel the same as they do.

Finding a customer that is your ideal customer. Then finding a few more. You don’t want to find only the happy ones. Find the mad ones.

What is it that you can do, so much better, that your competition doesn’t. Then capitalize on that.

When you get to the real problems that your customers are voicing you can begin making “ULTIMATE GUIDES” to solving them. Then they start linking to that guide. That helps your SEO. Other professionals that are in closely related fields start linking to it. Then you write a case study about how it did for the marketing community. All of the sudden you are a power ranker.

This all starts with Market Research.

The Process Behind Maximum Audience Engagement

There is a process that you have to go through. While each step needs to be performed, others may have alternative ways of performing them. This is just the way I handle this process.

Research Your Market – This is totally different than market research. This is where you stalk your competitors. What are their targets? Go through their sales funnels. Watch their videos. Note key terms, phrases, and of course when they showcase pricing. What does their funnel look like?

Market Research – This is where you take a little stalker time towards your customers. Go to Buzzsumo and look for the top 10 blogs for each “major term” in your industry. Look for the most shared and linked to content. Then consume that. Again you take key phrases out of it. Now take all those key phrases and enter them into quora. Enter them into board reader. Find every conversation and keep it on a spreadsheet. These will become sales funnels, blog topics, and guides.

Website and Funnel Creation. -Take the new found problems and turn them into solutions. Your product does X. Your customer has X problem. Connect the dots for the customer.

Content – Create an epic guide (the title is more important than the content) *Has to have solid content but realize that it needs to showcase the problem and how to solve it, that’s it.

Drive Traffic and A/B Test – Look we all get it wrong sometimes. Take the content and run it through some traffic test. See if 1,000 visitors react differently to the content. Who resonates with it? Who subscribes. What are your conversion rates? Take this time to call some of the people subscribing. Find out what they thought. What are they struggling with the most?

Repeat – You should constantly be A/B testing titles. Then test the traffic. It becomes a habit of sorts.

Using the above process makes you product content straight from your audiences mouth. That is when they will consume it best. When you learn to use their words. Their hopes. Their fears.

There is ONE Major last piece to the puzzle.

Real Content is SO Hard To Find

Making real content takes time. It takes knowledge. It takes ambition. Most of all… It is WORTH IT!

When you are building out your perfect little funnel with the best epic guide ever you are probably screwing yourself. Sorry, I know it sucks but it is completely true.

I am guilty of this as well. I write to myself and hit publish. I push traffic and get… Wait for it…

That’s right. You missed the mark.

It feels terrible. You feel defeated.

The magical part is that you are not keeping it Real.

During the market research phase, you have to learn to gain empathy. Take out self interest and remember the Golden Rule. They are filling a real feeling of pain and discomfort. If your product can really solve that then you now have a “Duty” and a “Privilege” to serve that person.

That’s right. You are “knight like.” You should serve your customer and make their feelings matter. They should see so much greatness in what you provide and how you provide it that they want to talk to you. You are just cool to them.

If you were a professional basketball player “LeBron James or Steph Curry.” Every “good” basketball player wants to be you.

You want to be “the shooting coach to Steph Curry.” That is the resonance you want to leave behind after someone reads your content. You take their pain and solve it. You make them a better version of themselves.

Wrapping It All Around Marketing

Audience Engagement is powerful. When you have 80,000 people sharing your content it drives massive results. To get there follow the key process. Identify with your prospects. Root yourself in their pain.

Good luck and let me know if you have any other useful tricks for gaining engagement below.

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Will Robins

Husband and Father, Will focuses on family first under God.If you are searching for an engaged audience, the kind we all dream of, then you have found the right website. Will uses a personality with amazing salesmanship in his teaching.He focuses on how successful websites have grown their viewers and engagement.